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Saturday, March 28, 2009

YouTube EDU: YouTube, which is owned by Google has started a separate section catering solely to education. It is a collection of channels of many colleges and universities and contains video lectures from these colleges and universities.

Presently, YouTube EDU is only offering their service to qualifying two- and four-year degree granting public and private colleges and universities. Hopefully, they will soon extend their services to K-12 schools also. It will be really great if K-12 teachers could have a platform where they did not have to worry about the content of the videos that are displayed. Although, presently, they can always use TeacherTube as a great alternative. It caters specifically to educational videos.

This new venture is a result of Google's 20 percent concept, which is part of Google's philosophy, where employees use 80% of their time working on their designated work and 20% of their time on projects that interest them. Many features of Google and many products launched by Google have been the result of this 20 percent time.

Sunday, March 22, 2009

I attended the ASSET (Association of Suffolk County Supervisors for Educational Technologies) conference on Monday, March 16, 2009. The keynote speaker was David Pogue of the New York Times. His keynote address was phenomenal. He talked about how mobile technology advanced so much now as cell phone use is not limited to making phone calls anymore but is used for other purposes like emails, text messages, Internet browsing.

He had a lot to say about the phenomenon of Google. He mentioned Google many times during his keynote and then also presented a workshop on “The power of Google”. In this post, I I want to share all the information that David Pogue shared with us about Google.

Instead of calling 411 for information and having to pay for it, you could simply text “Google” (466453) and then type in your question. It could be any question like “Who is the president of Mexico?”. You will get an instant answer. If you don’t want to text, then you can call 1-800-GOOG-411 and ask your question. You could ask for a phone number of a certain store and you will be connected to it directly.

In the workshop titled ‘Power Googling’, David Pogue, spoke about the various search features of Google. It goes beyond simple web search. Here are some tips”

If you are searching for a word like ‘Dolphins’, chances are that your search may also include information about the Miami Dolphins. In order to omit this information, you should enter your search as ‘dolphins -Miami’, meaning search for the word dolphins minus the word Miami.

If you are looking for an exact phrase, then you should put the phrase within quotes - “Exact phrase”, otherwise Google will also search for each key word separately. For example: "The Count of Monte Cristo" will generate a search result of all the websites that has the exact phrase "The Count of Monte Cristo" and not look for sites that also contain "Count", "Monte" and Cristo".

Use an asterisks '*' for wildcards, especially if you are looking for music lyrics and don't know that complete title. For example, la vida es*.

If you are looking for a specific type of file, for example, if you are looking for a PowerPoint file on 'The Imperfect Tense in Spanish', then you should type 'imperfect tense Spanish .ppt'.

Saturday, March 14, 2009

I think Google Maps would be a great tool to use while teaching vocabulary based on places and buildings in a community. As a part of a project, each student or group can pick 8-10 places in their town and create a Google map, where they mark these places on the map using place marks and then write in the target language about the store or building and what is sold there or what happens there. They can even insert a photo of the place or even add a video.

Friday, March 6, 2009

Recently, during a conversation with a fellow educator, I learned that some schools do not allow students to save files on the school server in order to save space. It just so happened that I was going to talk about Google Apps that day. What a perfect solution! Using Google Apps would keep both parties happy. You could have students do their work using the various Google Apps and not have to worry about using any of the school's server space.

Google Docs could be perfect for individual projects as well as collaborative projects. For example, if your students are working on a collaborative language project, let's say a project about family, they could collaborate and brainstorm on a Google Doc and then present the project using Google Presentation.